Round Ireland in Low Gear (28 page)

Down at the south-western end of Inisheer near the lighthouse, towards sunset, alone in this world of stone, 1650 miles from St John’s, Newfoundland, give or take a few miles, we really felt that we had come to the end of the road so far as Europe was concerned – at that time we had not ventured as far west as the Great Blasket. For five days we stayed in a house in Baile an Lurgain, one of the five villages on Inisheer and of the twenty-six villages on the three islands, all of which have the most intricate boundaries which
were already in danger of being forgotten. During this time I managed to wangle myself into a
currach
as a third member of the crew, having satisfactorily demonstrated that I was a fairly skilled oarsman, and went lobster-potting with them around the west side of the island. They had some good catches. The weather was calm so I shall never know now how good I would have been as one of the crew in bad weather. To prove what the sea can do in these parts was the wreck of the freighter
Plassy
, which went on the Carraig na Finnise reef in March 1960 and was later thrown high up on the shore, well above normal high tide level, where she remains to this day. What we both remember most about Inisheer was the intense cold in our bedroom. The only dishes we can recall were the amazing potatoes and the endless dollops of Birds custard.

Our host was an archetypal islander, very tall, with a large, long nose and grizzled straight hair, and he spoke
veery
slowly in beautiful English for our benefit, as if it was caviar not words he was dealing in. Every night we were there – there was no such thing as television on the island – he grilled me about New York, having heard that I had been there on several occasions, questioning me
veery, veery
slowly in his beautiful English, and
veery, veery
thoroughly. On the day we left he let us know that he had been janitor of a building on Lexington Avenue for something like fifteen years. I could gladly have murdered him.

In summer the islanders did well out of lobster fishing and tourism. In winter, even then, many of them were on the dole; but they had strong links with the United States (as I now well knew), to which many of them emigrated, and they had rent-free houses and a grant for speaking Irish, for this part of the world is regarded as one of the founts of the language. In fact it is thought they may be descended from an English garrison that was maintained there in the seventeenth century, but, nevertheless,
must also have links with people who inhabited the islands much further back in time. Perhaps their lineage stretches back to when the Duns, the great stone forts of Aran, were built, the oldest in the Iron Age: Dun Aengus, Dun Oghil, Don Onact and Dubh Cathair (the Black Fort) on Inishmore; Dun An Mothar and Dun Conor on Inishmaan; and Dun Forma on Inisheer. Or to the time when the churches, chapels and oratories of early Christian anchorites flourished, some of which are buried in the sand, and the holy wells, saints’ beds of stone, caves, pillar stones,
clochans
, altars, cross slabs and monastic settlements. Notable among early Christians was St Eanna, otherwise Enda, the first to introduce monasticism in the severest sense of the word into Ireland. Here he lived and worked, giving St Brendan his blessing before he set off on his perilous voyage. And here he was buried in about 530, surrounded, it is said, by the 127 saints whom he had taught. Eanna’s Household, Tighlagheany, is the holiest place in Aran, its great church surviving until it was destroyed by the Cromwellians.

Whatever their antecedents, the islanders, at least the male ones, can be almost breathtakingly venal. On the day in October 1966 that we left Inisheer for the mainland it turned out that the only
currach
at that moment available to take us out to the ship was the one in which I had gone out fishing on several occasions with the two-man crew, with whom I had struck up what seemed a pleasant relationship. I had also treated them with considerable generosity in the pub each time we came ashore without, as I recall, ever being given a drink in return. In spite of this they now demanded something in the region of £5, which was at that time an outrageous sum, to take us 100 yards to the ship, which they did with the air of men who had never set eyes on either of us before. Not only this but our host, the ex-janitor from Lexington Avenue, who was down on the beach to see us off, did nothing whatever to dissuade them. There was nothing to do but pay up.

Altogether, at that time, the islanders were the envy of many people on the mainland who did not enjoy the same subsidies. They themselves, however, did not think themselves particularly lucky: ‘Ach’, they used to say, in voices as soft as the wind, ‘that’s how it goes.’

Now, in 1986, things were different; but not all that different. The skyline was the same, although there were now tractors down on the beach and souvenir shops and craft shops, and a craft kitchen, whatever that was, and a restaurant and two pubs with shops attached, and a camping gas shop, and a public convenience and a camp site and an air strip with daily flights from Galway city, and a co-operative weaving venture; and television ruled the waves. A
currach
now cost £500; many of them were fitted with outboards and you were still grossly overcharged to ride in one. No one wore the costume any more, as far as I could see, with the exception of the caps. I didn’t see a single donkey but I expect they were there all right, working away up in the
boreens.
I got my biggest shock as soon as I embarked in Galway, on seeing the entire upper deck space of the ship forward taken up with plastic sacks filled with Dutch potatoes, bound for Inishmore.

This was the week in which fishermen in eight
currachs
off Inishmaan, wearing balaclavas and carrying sacks of stones, confronted three Irish fishery protection vessels which were forced to withdraw from the scene after their crews had been pelted with stones ‘as there was a serious threat to life and limb’. The islanders were protesting against the confiscation of their illegal, small mesh monofilament drift nets with which nearly 90 per cent of all salmon reaching the Irish coast were being caught and which the Western Regional Fisheries Manager described as ‘a threat to salmon angling and spawning’. One islander was said to be earning £17,000 a year fishing from his
currach
with these nets. Their right
to fish was defended by the local curate, Father Liam MacNally, who said that it was a question of survival for the Inishmaan men, who needed the summer salmon and lobster season to put food in their children’s mouths and were entitled to use the best nets available. It was unfair, he said, that large trawlers could put down three and four miles of drift netting, while smaller, local boats were being interfered with. When I left the dispute was still continuing.

Off Inishmaan we went through the whole paraphernalia of putting passengers and freight ashore by
currach
and then loading up again – one
currach
put off for the shore with all the window frames for a house on board. Then we sailed on past what must be one of the most beautiful white sand beaches, the water turquoise in the shallows under a blazing sun. At 2.45 we berthed alongside the jetty at Kilronan on Inishmore, and really it looked just as attractive as it had all that time ago. There were still the horse-drawn carts to take you about the island and now a brisk business was being done in bike hire; but I had my own bike.

The Captain told me he was sailing at 4.45, even if I wasn’t back, and I set off at a terrific rate to visit the greatest of the duns of Aran, Dun Aengus, using the Shimano oval chainwheels to some effect and glad, really, that Wanda wasn’t there to be told that she was in the seventies gearwise when she urgently needed to be in the thirties. For the last part of the way you cannot ride even a mountain bike, so I left mine in a ditch and continued on foot. I’d decided I wasn’t mad about mountain bikes. When you get to an Irish version of Kilimanjaro you have to carry them anyway.

To attempt to write about Dun Aengus and bring some sort of freshness to it is rather like trying to perform a similar service for Stonehenge: so many people have attempted it before that one is tempted to give up. What one is looking at is not only one of
the wonders of Ireland, but of the entire western world. It is the greatest of the Irish stone forts; George Petrie, the nineteenth-century Irish landscape painter and antiquary, thought it ‘the most magnificent barbaric monument now extant in Europe’ when he visited it in 1821.

It stands on the edge of a sheer 270-foot cliff which overhangs the sea, on a sheet of the bare limestone of which the islands are composed. Approaching it along the one road that spans the entire length of Inishmore it loomed on the skyline to the west, a sombre cyclopean mass with a single cyclopean eye, an entrance gateway through which the light of day was shining.

The walls are dry-stone, built of unworked blocks laid in courses, some of them up to 7 feet long. I went through the now ruined outer walls into an enormous enclosure, the first of three, all roughly concentric, the innermost of which is the citadel. In this first enclosure one is faced with what looks like a dense forest of fossilized tree stumps up to 3 feet high which seem to grow from the living rock or else sprout from the wall in which they have been immovably planted. This abbatis, or
cheval-de-frise
(although the use of cavalry at such a time and in such a situation can scarcely have been envisaged) extends outwards from the wall for a distance of 80 feet in some places and beyond this are the remains of other walls, which formed outworks. Through these defences a sloping pathway leads into the second, middle enclosure through a gateway surmounted by a huge lintel stone. Beyond this middle enclosure is the citadel, an astonishing construction with walls 18 feet high in places and nearly 13 feet thick. All the walls have terraces, reached by steep flights of steps. A low gateway leads into the heart of Dun Aengus, which one would expect to be a claustrophobic enclosure, hemmed in as it is on all sides, with perhaps an Irish version of the Minotaur roaming in it. In fact there is nothing. Just the enclosure, with the walls terminating
at the edge of the great cliff, and below and beyond it the Atlantic, stretching away to what the islanders believed was Hy Brasil, the enchanted island of the west.

Back on board, everyone sunbathed on deck until Black Head on the coast of County Clare was abeam and there we once more entered the realms of rain and suicidal darkness. Fortunately, it was only necessary to look astern to see the islands still swimming in a glittering sea to remember that the day had not been simply some extravagant dream.

And this I dare avow, there are more rivers, lakes, brooks, strands, quagmires, bogs and marshes in this country than in all Christendom besides; for travelling there in the winter all my daily solace was sink-down comfort … I was never before reduced to such a floating labyrinth, considering that in five months’ space I quite spoiled six horses, and myself as tired as the worst of them.

W
ILLIAM
L
ITHGOW
.
Rare Adventures and Painfull
Peregrinations 1614–32

Thunderstorms are without doubt the most dramatic weather phenomenon experienced in Ireland. They occur in the unstable atmospheric conditions favourable for the development of heavy showers, but their unique and spectacular features are of course thunder and lightning.

Monthly Weather Bulletin, June 1986, published by the
Meteorological Service, Dublin

The following morning – the day of the Great Irish Divorce Referendum – was warm and hazy, and I went to the bank to draw some money to pay Mrs Robinson for the accommodation. As it turned out, I drew much too much. The bill for four nights’ B and B – two nights for two of us, two for myself alone – plus various delicious meals and snacks, drinks and cups of tea at odd hours of the day and night, came to an unbelievable £42. I said goodbye to them with genuine regret. They were a splendid pair. Mrs Robinson was a woman of demonic energy and invincible goodwill and spirits. Her husband, John, had been badly wounded by a German stick grenade while serving with the British Army at the crossing of the Rhine in 1945. After the war he had become a staff photographer on a local paper, specializing in wedding groups, but had eventually been forced by bad health to give up, although he sometimes did some work for his son, who had a flourishing agricultural machinery repair business and a nice, modern house up the coast a bit. They also had three grown-up daughters, one of whom had just arrived from Canada with her husband and their newly born baby.

Then I took the road out of Galway for Headford, the wind now dead ahead from the north. It looked all right, this road, on
a map that had last been revised in 1957, but it was filled with lorries loaded with unsecured crap bound for the City of Galway municipal dump. As a result I was showered with plastic bags, ashes and, even worse, planks studded with four-inch nails that had once added up to a garden shed, which fell from one lorry into the road at approximately 100-yard intervals. Most impressive was something called a Portaloo, a sort of mass lavatory which had been wrenched from its foundations and was being carried on a flat car to the same destination, a Galway
Côte d’Ordures
, with its plumbing still dripping.

After this disappointing beginning, the road, now dead straight for seven miles, entered an expanse of bog full of bog cotton, irises and flaming gorse – all the usual bog ingredients, plus a grassy tumulus or two – that stretched away towards invisible Lough Corrib and the distant hills beyond. This was to the left of the road. To the right what until recently had been the same bog was invisible behind what had become a ribbon development including the municipal dump, a car wreckers’ establishment, a trucking depot, and a large antiques emporium.

After some miles I stopped at a pub at Cloonboo (what a name) where a very pretty girl served me with a pint and, as it was Referendum Day, with the whole Irish nation agog, gave me a free run-down on the situation as she saw it.

‘Sure, and I’m all for it,’ she said, and when I asked her what she was all for: ‘The divorce, I mean, fellers being what they are. But I’m in a minority,’ she went on. ‘Most of the girls and boys round here, what I call the “teenagers”, them’s against it.’

Beyond Cloonboo, I entered a region where it was sheep-shearing day and from time to time the road was choked with sheep that had either been newly shorn and had had new number plates stencilled on them, or else had just been dipped in antiseptic and smelled foul. The road beyond this village became even more
boring; how I envied Wanda quietly harvesting a bumper crop of strawberries. To effect my escape from it, and to get away from the north wind, I made an enormous detour eastwards to see Finnbheara’s Castle, a splendid walled cairn, part ancient, part Georgian folly, with a genuine prehistoric cairn nearby.

Finnbheara’s Castle is on top of Knockmaa, a whacking great hill miles from anywhere, in the demesne of eighteenth-century Castle Hacket, burnt 1923, rebuilt 1929. I rose slowly and majestically to the summit, along a path hemmed in by dense woods and rhododendron groves, passing an earlier castle with trees growing inside it, and from the top I could see for miles in almost every direction. The insect life was prodigious. This hill is the legendary otherworld seat of Finnbheara, ruler of the fairies of Connacht, who fought a battle here against those of Munster. Who won? It isn’t important. They were fighting for the fun of it, like all good Irish fairies.

Towards evening I arrived at Cong, a pretty village in County Mayo on an isthmus which separates Lough Corrib from Lough Mask. Rather like Dingle and its peninsula, Cong and its environs have almost too great an abundance of relics of the past. I booked in at the White House, Prop. Mrs Connolly, who was uncertain about divorce and hadn’t voted (only 40 per cent of eligible voters had), and spilled the contents of my pannier bags over the fitted carpet in the huge room I had commanded for £8. Then I washed some intimate garments, which an anti-British goose tried to prevent me from hanging on a line in the back yard, before setting off for the area in the north known as the Plain of Southern Moytura.

This plain, a strange and haunted place, was the site of one of the great battles of Irish myth between the Tuatha De Danaan, a tall race with magical propensities, and the small, dark Firbolgs, or Men of The Bag, known as such because they were forced to
carry bags of earth while enslaved in Greece. The battle lasted four days and the Firbolgs were defeated;
⁴⁴
their King, Eochy (otherwise Eochai), was killed and interred beneath the cairn which bears his name, a mighty heap of pale stone concealing within it a passage grave, the entrance to which is as well concealed as the route leading to it. Even the official directions in the
Guide to the National Monuments
, ‘Access: half a mile up a laneway [which laneway?] then left down another laneway, and then 300 yards across six fields and stone walls. Not signposted’, gives only a bare idea of how difficult it is to reach this haunting monstrosity which stands, for those of faint heart, forever unattainable in a labyrinth of sub-standard
boreens
. But it is worth the effort, if only for the view.

There is another large cairn, 60 feet high, at Ballymacgibbon North, east of Cong. According to Sir William Wilde, surgeon, Irish antiquary and father of Oscar Wilde, who lived at Moytura House nearby, on the shores of Lough Corrib, it was raised by the Firbolgs, who each threw down a stone for each member of the Tuatha De Danaan they had slain on the first day of the battle, when they were still winning – a romantic theory subsequently discredited, no doubt correctly but drearily, by modern savants.

Then back to Cong for tea and scones in The Ladies’ Buttery, after which I cycled through what looked like a chasm, but was in fact man-made – the Lough Mask-Corrib Canal. In the late 1840s and early 1850s hundreds of workers, some paid as little as 3d a day, took five years to cut it for a distance of three miles through the limestone, only to find that when the water was finally
admitted, it simply seeped away. It must be the only canal anywhere with a hand ball court in it. Meanwhile, in what was now the rapidly growing gloaming, anglers were unsuccessfully flogging the beautiful waters of the river Corrib for salmon and Cong, with its almost too neatly tended abbey ruins and its gigantic fortress, Ashford Castle, built by a Guinness, now a luxurious hotel, became like India in the gloaming, intolerably melancholy. I rang Wanda. The news was terrible. Within the space of twenty-four hours from the time she set off to gather them, squirrels had not only cleared the kitchen garden of every ripe strawberry but every white unripe one too, though they had spared the raspberries. Sometimes it is difficult to remain a lover of wildlife.

At six the following morning my alarm went off. I woke to find that although it was only a week after the longest day, when sunrise or at least a lightening of the eastern sky can be more or less confidently expected in these parts around a quarter to four, it was still so dark that the birds were carrying on roosting, apart from the owls around the abbey ruins, which could be heard complaining to one another at the excessive length of their working night. Then the heavens opened to the accompaniment of violent thunder and lightning, with Cong village its apparent target, which sent the birds shrieking into the air and made the White House shudder. Unlike most storms, this one went on and on. So, having eaten a very good breakfast and packed my still sodden underwear in my stuff sac, and having said goodbye to the goose by hissing at it through clenched teeth, I delayed no longer and set off northwards, bound for Ballinrobe and Westport, thinking it must end soon.

I hadn’t gone very far when I realized that it was getting worse. By now I was on a stretch of road on which the only shelter was provided by trees on which were descending enormous, distorted prongs of lightning produced by the discharge of anything up to
1000 million volts every twenty seconds – the equivalent of ten nuclear bombs of the sort dropped on Hiroshima. I was frightened. In fact I was so frightened that when I came to the next stretch of dry-stone wall I abandoned my bike, distanced myself from its lethal steel, and cowered down with my back to it waiting for the trees above me to catch fire and shrivel. No sooner had I assumed this foetal position than whoever was responsible moved the storm away eastwards into Galway and Roscommon, although the rain still continued to fall in torrents.

Altogether, it was a great storm in a country in large areas of which violent explosions are part of the way of life. It continued to blast its way round Ireland throughout Saturday and part of Sunday morning, making a total of two thousand lightning strikes on the Electricity Board’s installations, and cutting thousands of telephone, telex and cable television lines, although how anyone could detect any difference in the telephone service before or after it is something only the Irish can decide. It left twenty thousand houses without electricity, the Malin Head weather station with a total of fifty-seven power cuts during Saturday night, and produced hailstones as big as golf balls in County Wexford. At Gibbon’s pub in Neale, a hamlet south of Ballinrobe, where I stopped for a drink, the landlady had been so frightened that she had taken to her bed and buried her head under the clothes, a position she was still in when I arrived and shouted up the stairs to tell her that it was all over.

From Ballinrobe I set off on a horribly long detour to Castlecarra, on the shores of Lough Carra, the last part down a lane so muddy, so teeming with insects that I felt like a moose in the north of Canada.

Castlecarra was a truly enchanting place. The castle, a tower in a walled enclosure, stood on a tree-clad promontory overlooking the Lough. In the woods around it were the ruins of houses and
outbuildings, all moss- and ivy-grown under the trees. Down on the beach a little band of boys who had also arrived here by bike were bathing – those who could swim at all energetically dog-paddling. It was a wonderful afternoon now, with the wind in the east rustling the trees. Offshore to the west was the island on which the novelist George Moore is buried. I had been to his house, Moore Hall, on the way to Castlecarra. Square and grey and austere, it was a shell, burnt out in 1923. Now it was hidden in a hideous Forestry Department conifer plantation which blocked what had once been a splendid view from it over the Lough.

Now the sky became jet-black and it poured for the next sixteen miles all the way to Westport where by 5 p.m. in June it was as dark and wet as it would have been in December. That evening I put up at P. Dunning’s pub which stands on one of the eight sides of the Octagon, part of a large-scale eighteenth-century piece of town planning initiated by Peter Browne, second Earl of Altamont, and carried out by James Wyatt, in the course of which the town of Westport was rebuilt more or less as an appendage (or servants’ quarters) to Westport House, the seat of the Brownes, later Marquises of Sligo as well as Earls of Altamont, near the shores of Clew Bay. Their great wealth had come from the marriage of the second Earl to the heiress to vast sugar plantations in Jamaica. In the middle of this Octagon was what remained of a memorial to George Glendinning, banker and son of the Rector of Westport, who did everything he could to alleviate the sufferings of the local peasantry during the Famine. The only thanks he got was to have his statue pulled down in 1922 during the Civil War, and the inscription on it defaced. He was a friend to Ireland, albeit British, which makes what the Irish do on occasion to their enemies scarcely surprising.